Stark

Santa brought me a locally published book about our village in WWII, written by a local historian who was born here in 1946 and has never left. I'm cautious of the British obsession with our mythology about those years, but this is good social history about the impact of international war on a small, backward community of marginal significance

In 1939, the village had locally generated electricity only for the school and a few large houses, there was no sewage system and no piped water supply - worse, the local water was known to be either disease bearing or so hard that it was low in iodine, so drinking water was brought in in bowsers. Agriculture was unmechanised and much land was low quality grazing. The iron ore works had gone bankrupt and was all but shut down

Bizzarely for such a back-water, the one effective, war-ready local service that the book identifies is the fire service - well organised, well staffed by volunteers and equipped with ageing, but functional, machinery. Then, as now, there was a close association with the brewery - in the days when brewing relied on a steam engine and fires to heat the brewing kettles, it was probably in their interests! The fire station is almost certainly the least attractive building in the parish - unless you appreciate the triumph of function over form. On a day of relentless gloom and driving rain, it achieves a particularly triumphant ugliness

The chapter I found most affecting was the impact on children. Evacuees from Barking and Dagenham, East London, swelled the village school to the point where classes were held in rooms all around the village. As the war progressed and the shipping blocade restricted food and other supplies, children were enlisted in the response: days out of school for potato picking; mending old clothes in needlework classes, making fire-beaters (to put out crop fires) in woodwork class. In 1941, the school garden produced 1 tonne of potatoes, 0.5 tonne onions, 1 tonne carrots and 0.5 tonne beetroot

A blackberry-collecting day produced 55kg of jam. Rose-hip picking produced 1150kg of berries in October 1942 (destined for high vitamin C syrup). Horse chestnuts were collected (and paid for) in 1943, at the request of the Government. The reason was never made public, but they were used to produce acetone, for the manufacture of cordite, for weapons

There are no easy parallels to Ukraine and Palestine, but my mind can't help drifting that way